Stories from the trenches, by a fictional hiring partner at a large law firm in a major city.

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Two of the support staff got let go today under some odd and troubling circumstances. The story we're hearing is that apparently they overheard some tax associates discussing a certain client, for whom we've been employing some creative tax strategies to help them save money. (I'm not a tax lawyer, so I really don't know the specifics.) These two people on the support staff -- or so the story goes -- were somehow aware that the IRS pays a reward when people turn in tax offenders. And so they reported the client to the IRS. And he got audited, and has to pay some penalties. And the client blames us, because it turned out the IRS didn't like whatever creative strategies we had advised them to apply. And the tax partner in charge of the case somehow figured out that these support staffers were the ones who told the IRS. And he demanded they be let go for breaching confidentiality, or something along those lines. I'm not sure I understand the complete story, but I do know that I'm going to be awfully quiet about the cash I pay the cleaning woman each week, and my "home office." My assistant insists that if we treated the support staff better, they wouldn't be motivated to go turn our clients in to the government to get a tax reward. But my assistant also got the Code of Federal Regulations mixed up with the Bankruptcy Code, so what does she know?